Redesign or rebuild? Signs your website is losing you customers.

Three levels of fixing a website

Be honest about which level you need. A rebuild for a site that only needs better photos is wasted money.

Signs your site is costing you customers

• It is slow on a phone. Open it on mobile data. If you are waiting, so are your customers, and some of them leave.
• It breaks on small screens. Text you have to zoom, buttons too small to tap, menus that do not open.
• It looks older than your business. If your work is modern and your site is not, people notice the gap.
• You cannot update it. Changing a price means emailing someone who might not answer.
• Visitors do not turn into enquiries. People find you, but the phone does not ring and the form stays quiet.
• Security warnings or outdated plugins. Browser warnings or an admin full of update notices are a sign of risk, not just age.

How to check in ten minutes

• Open your homepage on your phone, on mobile data, not wifi. Count the seconds until you can read it.
• Run your homepage through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and look at the mobile score.
• Try to do what a customer would do: find your prices, your location, and how to contact you. Time it.
• Ask two friends who have never seen your site what you do, after ten seconds on the homepage.
• Check when the site was last updated. Old dates in the footer, news or blog tell visitors something too.

These are rules of thumb, not a full audit, but they will tell you quickly whether you have a cosmetic problem or a structural one.

Why speed and mobile matter for Google

Google says its core ranking systems look to reward a good page experience, and it recommends site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals, a set of measurements for loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability [1]. Google also uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking [2].

That does not mean a fast site jumps to the top by itself. Content still matters most. But a slow, awkward site on a phone is working against you on every visit.

Redesign or rebuild: how to decide

• If the site is fast and easy to update but looks dated, a redesign is enough.
• If it looks fine but is slow, fragile or locked to a platform you cannot change, consider a rebuild.
• If it is both slow and dated, which is common for sites older than five years or so, do both at once. It usually costs less than doing them separately.

Keep your Google rankings when you switch

This is where rebuilds go wrong. If your old pages rank on Google and their addresses change, those rankings can drop unless each old address points to the right new page.

Google's own guidance for site moves comes down to a few steps: prepare a map of old URLs to new ones, set up permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308) from each old URL, avoid chains of redirects, and keep an eye on traffic after the switch [3].

Whoever rebuilds your site should list every page that gets traffic today before touching anything. If they do not mention redirects, ask.

What to ask before you start

• Will I own the new site and its code?
• Which old pages will move, and how will old URLs redirect?
• Will my domain and email stay as they are?
• What is the fixed price, and what is not included?
• How will I update the site myself afterwards?

Where I stand

I rebuild websites for a living, so I am not neutral. Even so, I would rather tell you to fix three things and keep your site than sell you a rebuild you do not need.

If you want a second opinion, send me your address through the quote form and I will tell you which of the three levels I think you need.